Tender Hooks

by Beth Ann Fennelly

Overview

A fearless delineation of the joys, absorptions, and—yes—jealousies of new motherhood.

Beth Ann Fennelly is fearless in delineating the joys, absorptions, and—yes—jealousies of new motherhood. Having studied motherhood "as if for an exam," reality proved "wilder and deeper and funnier" than anything she'd anticipated.Tender Hooks is Fennelly's spirited exploration of parenting, with all its contradictions and complexities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393326857
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/17/2005
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	120
Sales rank:	1,110,125
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Beth Ann Fennelly is the author of three poetry collections, Unmentionables, Tender Hooks, and Open House; two memoirs, Heating & Cooling and Great with Child; and a novel, The Tilted World, coauthored with her husband, Tom Franklin. She teaches at the University of Mississippi, and is also the state’s Poet Laureate. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

Editorial Reviews

The pun of the collection's title probes a predominating theme: the messy, sometimes angry and frequently euphoric terrain of new motherhood. The first poem, "Bite Me," displays Fennelly's characteristic earthy brashness: "finally I burst at the seams/ and you were out/ Look, Ha, you didn't kill me after all/ Monster I have you." Like Plath minus the lyricism or Sharon Olds minus the sweet aftertaste, Fennelly doesn't flinch from showing the darker side of mothering, not just the can't-see-straight exhaustion and the anxiety of new parenthood, but the fury of both infant and mother: "No one ever mentioned she's out for blood. I wince/ as she tugs milk from ducts all the way to my armpits." The wrath is marched in equal doses by evidence of primal, physical love: "I whispered in her see-through ear/ I'd keep her safe forever-/ I, her first lover." The two middle sections of the collection include poems of place, parents, love, followed by a long, meandering poem that juxtaposes the Bible, miscarriage, teaching writing and the new baby. The book's last section returns to the (stronger) material of parenting and ends on an intentionally mixed note: responding to a commonsensical voice that says infancy, like the pangs of childhood, eventually fade into memory, Fennelly's speaker declares, "Fine, I say, not meaning it. I'll have another." (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Fennelly's second book follows close upon her first, Open House, a well-received winner of the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize. In this equally engaging new collection, Fennelly is caught up with the birth of a daughter and maps her obsession: the intense baby worship, the engorged breasts, the failed attempts to move on to another topic. Finally breaking free, she forges ahead to poems about life in the Midwest (she's from Illinois) and in Mississippi, where she has been teaching; other topics include her husband, her friends, and moving. Then she's back to little Claire and the grief of an earlier miscarriage. Fennelly counters academic pretension with American spunk: "Oh, I have been to the temples of Kyoto,/ I have stood on the Pont Neuf, and my eyes, they drank it in, but my taste buds/ shuffled along in the beer line at Wrigley Field./ It was the day they gave out foam fingers." The inability to stay still permeates these poems. Fennelly observes that her name sounds like "methamphetamine"; in "Moving," she refuses to retrace her steps, even to fix a faulty sentence: "Scheming to get our security deposit back, nail holes/ are spackled with toothpaste. Oops, our modifiers/ dangle." A smart and vivacious book.-Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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